did I turn the tiger off it?

allen levine

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Jim Delaney gave me a whole carload of bowl blanks, and he also brought along with him pen blanks and bottle stopper blanks.
since there weren't many takers, he was more than generous to allow me to take whatever I wanted(jons house)

I took 2 tiger maple? blanks, can see the lines, stripes? what happened when I turned it?

Its the one on the lathe, the other blank on left is some of the bowl blank trim offs, silver maple, not sure if Im keeping that one. Most of the day to prepare and turn those simple 3 blanks.Ill turn a half dozen or so more then I will start putting poly on them all at once.

good thing I have a lot of time on my hands.

I need a break from flatwork. Im trying to cast some pens but I haven't found the dye yet locally, too lazy to shop online and want to see it up close, maybe get to joanns this weekend.

not to worry, no one is buying my bottle stoppers, just use them as gifts when we give a bottle of wine to someone, makes a nice little gift set.
 

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Sometimes the curl in wood can be elusive. You might see it on the outside of a blank, but it might disappear as you get deeper into the wood. I've seen the opposite, too. PLain Jane blanks ended up having cool figure hiding inside. It's also fairly common for the chatoyance to vary quite a bit depending on the angle of the finished surface in relation to the grain of the wood. So as you turn a round thing, there will usually be some spots that show great figure, and other spots that don't.
 
I learn new things here everyday, thanx.

I usually turn 6-10 bottle stoppers at a time, and then pick and choose which ones look decent with just some CA glue on it.

The silver maple looked nice also until I turned it. Pretty plain now.

and getting back to my original idea of pen turning using dice, drilling out the pips, and filling it with white epoxy, didn't work out, dice cracked.
and the micro dice I ordered, never came from china, had to get refund from amazon. Wanted to try to cast tiny dice in acrylic and give it shot.
 
this blank looked better once turned.
did one inlace acrylester today, these 5 are first coat poly.
 

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Highly figured wood, IMHO, is best used on larger projects, same with colored wood like box elder burl. Smaller projects don't let the color/figure show much.
 
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